This Is Running for Your Life (6 page)

It was an unmitigated but highly empowered disaster. Aileen, trailed by pheromone-addled men wherever she went, got mixed up with a seasonal fisherman. After weeks spent pounding the pavement, I landed a job at a Kitsilano coffee shop by simply walking through the door, which might have been my first clue. The owner behaved like a member of the Hawaiian Mafia, squiring me to waterfront power lunches in my secondhand grubs. Turns out I was not criminal front material, though I worked enough customer-free nine-hour shifts to be spraying stale muffins with PAM when I heard that River Phoenix—and my childhood—was dead.

Around that time a midnight grappling session with an odious Frenchman behind the Kitsilano Youth Hostel ripped my earring clean through the lobe. “There goes your modeling career,” Aileen said.

A lot of things ended in Vancouver, which I suppose was the idea, though precious little arrived to take their place. Burgled of all of our belongings during the Winnipeg leg of a cross-country lark, we limped home to Ontario. I began shopping in BiWay's little-boys department, preparing for freshman year with five-mile runs, and giving sworn depositions by phone. Aileen went back out West to finish what we started, which is to say she wound up stripping and sunk into heavy drugs.

No Really, Who Is She?

Was it different when we did it because
we
were doing it? Our unextinguished idols, the ones who had lipsticked reputation-searing slurs onto their bodies, began indeed to fade from view. They were raped, as we were; they got older, just like us; their friends died, as ours did; they sold out and so did we. If they were Courtney Love, they suffered terribly, put out a breakthrough album, then settled on an almost touchingly quaint ambition of movie stardom. As though we were not already living through her. As though it were possible to inhabit a higher plane of our dreaming selves than the one haunted by her screwed-up face and napalm howls.

In the years after her Commodore Ballroom show, after her husband's suicide, I watched Love as closely as I did that night. Touring in 1995, she was wild with animal grief, hurling herself offstage and into a pit of young men. There is footage of them tearing the clothes from her body, grabbing at her breasts, and yanking down her underpants, as if rising to a challenge. The issue had moved approximately not at all: Where do a woman's intentions end and the world's indifference to them begin? Is it a statement—subversive or otherwise—if nobody's listening? Or no one can hear you above your breasts?

It was both music and the alternative movement's great loss when Courtney Love regained her composure, invested in a stylist, and began trolling red carpets in bias-cut Versace gowns. It was also a futile exercise. By 1997 the riot grrrl revolution was already being distilled into a highly structured ideal, one too tame for Love's big-shouldered persona.

Dreaming Is Twee

Consider the distance traveled by Winona Ryder between her alterna-girl apotheosis in
Reality Bites
(1994) and her wan incarnation of this new ideal in
Autumn in New York
(2000). With her slurry, tomboyish diction, marsupial eyes, butter-knife pixie cut, Dickensian slightness, and improbable breasts, Ryder was well known as the muse of 1990s rock stars and movie stars who would be rock stars. For this she was framed as both a throwback groupie and the acceptable face of alternative culture. In the Ben Stiller–directed
Reality Bites
, Ryder plays a recent college graduate and aspiring filmmaker stuck in a stalled job market and trapped between the dubious masculine counterpoints of a wastrel musician (Ethan Hawke) and a media suit (Stiller). Immobility forms a theme for her character, and Ryder's astrophysically complicated allure reaches Hawking-esque heights. And yet, compared to
Autumn in New York
, in which a literally terminally enchanting Ryder alights to show age-inappropriate commitment-phobe Richard Gere the redemptive way of the sprite,
Reality Bites
looks like
Norma Rae
.

Ryder's shivering sad girl underwent a kind of ritual sacrifice in 1999, when newcomer Angelina Jolie devoured her in every frame of
Girl, Interrupted
and licked the screen. But Jolie was quickly isolated and quarantined as an anomaly; she eventually shed the force of her personality and slipped behind the imperial mask of her beauty. As the new millennium began, for a host of young actresses and the young women watching them, there was Angelina and there was the rest of us. The leftover ingenues—including our Winona—were increasingly cast as pint-size oracles, elusive handmaidens, and afflicted, psychosexual fabulists partial to non sequitur and orange hoodies.

After years of manifesting mainly in referential fragments and glistening body parts, the dream girl had finally been wholly reinvented. Aggression, autonomy, sexual agency, and several varieties of stature had been bred out of her prototype in the screenwriting lab. Fully realized, she transmutes the rebellious energy of third-wave feminism into a set of soothing eccentricities to be applied directly to the culture's cowering manhood. Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, a prurient focus on the body stood in for a more fully imagined ideal. By the turn of the century, ingenues were still beholden to the warped terms of this kind of realism, but the focus had shifted from purely physical objectification to the tyranny of “personality.”

If you really wanted to, you could find modest overlap between this new type and every innocuous female character to cross the screen with a few marbles either missing or swirling around upstairs. What sets the modern dream girl apart from vaguely similar creations of decades past—like Shirley MacLaine's lovelorn gamine in
The Apartment
, for instance, Liza Minnelli's divinely brazen Sally Bowles, and a host of early Goldie Hawn roles—is the extent to which she's presented as both wildly original and straight out of the coffee shop. She lives in your world, somewhere between sex and safety. Not just believable, she's so well within reach you may already have met her.

(A question: If the true dream girl seems to have emerged from our imaginations, does the fact that this version feels familiar qualify her as the real thing? To me it doesn't matter whether she was inspired by “real” women—something her creators often claim—or triggered an avalanche of jejune posturing. Some have called her a pure projection; with its suggestion of overlay, superimposition gets closer to the trouble. All two-dimensional tics and self-conscious dysfunction, she is more formula than fantasy, more personality than persona. Rather than distinguishing themselves, a wide array of actresses have been swallowed by the mantle of her mannerisms. The character is so stuffed with this fatuous, hipster fairy-tale idea of personality that she jams the imagination instead of colonizing it.)

More insidiously a male creation than anything as obvious as Sharon Stone's cervical cynosure or the newly mainstream porn stars, this was an exclusive, divisive ideal. Though she set off a kind of daisy chain of mimetic desire, real-life girls were not invited to share in her invention.

It took real-life girls—many of whom wondered whether they were supposed to try on this new costume of quirks or congratulate filmmakers for finally getting them right—a while to figure this out. On the set of
Garden State
in 2003, actress Natalie Portman described her character, a literal spastic who draws the lead, Zach Braff, out of his world-phobic catatonia, this way: “Sam's just a really … she's a funny girl. Most parts written for women, especially romantic parts written by guys, are like some weird ideal of what a guy would want a girl to be. Like, she's hot, she takes off her clothes a lot—she also
really
likes sports. And this is a real person who's got problems, and she's funny and she's just as interesting and complex as the male character, and I appreciated that.”

Having problems and being “funny” became leading dream-girl qualities. For those of us out in the field, the new girl appeared as both a watered-down affront to iconoclasm (or sadness, for that matter) and a willful force to be reckoned with.

And Then There's This

There was a period, when the Internet was still a largely written medium, where it became frighteningly possible—even necessary—to cultivate not just a new persona but a new
type
of persona. Of the options available for poaching, few were as dependent on voice as the dithering new dream chick. E-mail was the perfect contagion for an ideal defined by her physical and metaphysical absence. For the cohort coming of age just as intranets spread through college campuses, e-mail offered a new forum for an old romantic exercise. Inventing both one's self and one's ideal reader is the epistolary prerogative, and in e-mail's first, great epistolary era, I was not alone in playing Edison at the keyboard.

Especially in the early, sweaty stages of acquaintance, e-mail opened up a kind of perpetual empty stage, an endless call for encores. Though courtly protocols lingered into the age of digital woo, the distancing, disposable aspect of e-mail was also a kind of equalizer. In the unregulated realm of online communication, women didn't worry in the same way about appearing too forward, too interested, too available. What was this back-and-forth anyway but a pixilated game? Private correspondence was soon confined to screens that homogenized the idiosyncrasies of text, temperament, and time into the rigid uniform of font, format, and instantaneousness. We learned to work around these deficits—explaining our moods, drafts, and deletions, and using space, ellipses, and emoticons to develop a grammar that might somehow mimic the intimacies of longhand.

What remained—and will remain, as long as there is language between us—is the extent to which one could glean, between and beyond a lover's words, a sense of what is being sought. It didn't take long for young women still conducting intersex experiments to notice that the combination of constant availability and spectral absence had a kind of incentivizing effect. Long-distance relationships cropped up at awkward and often insurmountable coordinates,
emotional infidelity
was midwifed into the lexicon, and all around the world, certain girls were discovering that what uncertain young men often responded to—off-line too, but somehow more palpably on—was the perpetration of a dream girl whose allure was based in her being not quite there.

This is not the elusive, untouchable quality—the
presence
—that writ the dream girls of old so large. This is the banal absence—of stability, of ambition, of selfhood, of sexual threat, of skirts that pass midthigh—now associated with the approachably edgy, adorably frantic, real-person-who's-got-problems. Maybe it was a class-action-size case of codependency: though she reached the status of dream girl, she feels more like a fun-house reflection of millennial masculinity in crisis. Her widespread attraction suggests the extent to which she reflects a young man's fears about finding a place in the world, much less figuring out the opposite sex. Like a girly mini-me, she follows in the proverbial hipster dude's shadow, filling his ear with life-coaching tips or just adorable chatter, skipping behind him on the path to mutually assured regression. In the movies, the new version of a happy ending for these stunted young men is not marriage or more than a provisional suggestion of romance. Instead the stories revel in the bittersweetness of edging a reluctant boy into manhood, whether his twittery comrade merely disappears at the end or indeed dies trying to get him there.

Often, as with Portman in
Garden State
, Charlize Theron in
Sweet November
(2001, RIP), and Kirsten Dunst in
Elizabethtown
(2005), avatars of this ideal attach themselves to the mixed-up young man with blithe aggression. They forge rehabilitation programs, scatter aphorisms (“Men see things in a box, and women see them in a round room” and “I'm impossible to forget but hard to remember” are two from the latter), and declare faux-obscure cultural allegiances that feel written in a particular way: they reek of the self-conscious blather of wee-hour e-mails, the personality-as-taxonomy rubric of online profiles, the ideal as an unending feedback loop of references mucked into a vaguely female form.

I'm a Substitute Person, I Like It That Way

It was in fact
Elizabethtown
, Cameron Crowe's unintentionally self-reflexive meditation on a man's first, headlong failure, that inspired the critic Nathan Rabin to finally put a name to this trend in 2007. Christening her the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Rabin riffed out a few salient qualities: “[She is] that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” She's also divisive: “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.”

The name, of course, is perfect. And in his first pass at wrangling the phenomenon Rabin struck upon its paradox: the MPDG seems to be both someone else's one-dimensional idea of a dream girl and a general rejection of the dream girl tradition. Since 2007, Rabin and others have worked backward to legitimate the coinage, drawing up a lineage that includes actresses like Claudette Colbert and both Katharine and Audrey Hepburn. Contradictions and inconsistencies in the search for forebears (Jeanne Moreau in
Jules et Jim
? Seventy-five-year-old Ruth Gordon in
Harold and Maude
?) have cheerfully been cited as part of an ongoing, trial-and-error effort to establish her as a player across film history. But to deny the ephemerid nowness of the MPDG is to deny her of her full, fluttery due, and to deprive the genesis story of a uniquely flimsy nonpareil of its telling modernity.